Perspective

Anyone who’d read more than a few of these blog posts knows that sometimes I’ll write about something just because it seems cool. Or looks cool. In this case, “cool” is two photos from Carol Highsmith, a professional photographer who was generous enough to donate her archive to the Library of Congress, copyright free. I’ve occasionally used pictures from her archive in other blog posts.

In this case, the two photos (and she gives long descriptive names to her shots) are “A pedestrian’s-eye view on the Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses the East River between New York City’s Manhattan and Brooklyn boroughs, or county-like jurisdictions” and “A scene reminiscent of those depicted in movie high-speed chases beneath the 125th Street subway station in the Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan borough, one of five such county-like political jurisdictions in sprawling New York City”.

At the risk of being accused of nit-picking, the second title isn’t quite right. The 1 train is elevated at the 125^th Street station because of a steep valley there – it’s underground at the stations immediately north and south – but this isn’t that. This is the underside of the Riverside Drive viaduct a block to the west of the subway station.

The obvious link between these two pictures, besides the fact they’re both in New York, is the extreme perspective created by the structures. The cables of the bridge force the perspective as they dip down, and the repeated arched frames of the viaduct give nice regular indicators of distance. There was a long debate about “machine beauty” in the first third of the twentieth century, which at one extreme led to the Precisionists. This may seem out of character, but that movement leaves me cold. Human-made and machine-made objects have a real beauty, but there’s no need to exaggerate it to appreciate it. Whether or not Highsmith was consciously thinking about that kind of art, her photos show its connection to reality.